Posted
by
samzenpuson Sunday February 17, 2013 @11:42AM
from the all-things-being-equal dept.

First time accepted submitter Daniel_Stuckey writes "Bam! For anyone that's paid a speck of attention to the tedium of political redistricting, which happens while a state grows unevenly, (and must dynamically respond to density, electorate disparity, natural resources and ridgelines, etc.), this is straight out of some psychedelic dream. For Democrats, it could be straight out of a nightmare. That's because Freeman's map necessitates 50 equally populous United States. His methods for creating the map are explained thusly: 'The algorithm was seeded with the fifty largest cities. After that, manual changes took into account compact shapes, equal populations, metro areas divided by state lines, and drainage basins. In certain areas, divisions are based on census tract lines... The suggested names of the new states are taken mainly from geographical features.'"

It is pretty neat, but it still reflects 18th century thinking. If I look at my interests, beliefs, and the political issues that are important to me, my geographical location has little to do with it. Congresspeople shouldn't represent geographical regions, but specific groups of people, where ever they are. So every two years we hold an election, the top 435 get elected, and their constituents are the specific people that voted for them. Their vote in congress should be proportional to their number of constituents. What would be even better, is if an elected representative isn't keep promises, a voter should be able to go to a website, and switch to another.

The problem is the small state bonus. In 2000 Bush wouldn't have won without the extra votes that small states get beyond what they're populations justify. Candidates for President rarely if ever campaign in larger states because we have less pull than the smaller states do.

What's worse, is that these same states that are sparsely populated also tend to be welfare states where they're contributing far less to the federal tax receipts than they're receiving in tax dollars. All while fighting to eliminate programs that are necessary to keep the urban decay to a minimum.

No, they rarely campaign in states that always vote the same way, large or small. They campaign like maniacs in NH and IA because they're early, and they campaign like hell in the major swing states - ask anyone from Ohio.

I don't know if that's quite true. I live in a small state and there's very little campaigning ever done here. Why? Same reason that there's not a lot of campaigning done in other states: it's pretty much a given that no matter who runs under the Republican ticket, they'll get the most votes here. Kind of like how it really doesn't matter in California and New York, because they're going to go to the Democrats. Why bother campaigning beyond a token appearance when everyone already knows that baring any major scandals, the results are practically a given. So really, it's just the states that have early primaries or the swing states that get the most attention.

Also the system was originally designed in such a way so that the larger, more populous states wouldn't have too strong of an influence over the federal government.

welfare states where they're contributing far less to the federal tax receipts than they're receiving in tax dollars

is a very tired meme. The federal government spends most of its money on defense, interest, and income transfers, of which Social Security and Medicare are by far the largest. The red states get the defense dollars because the South has warm weather year-round and the West has cheap land for bombing ranges and secrecy. The red states get income transfers because, well, they're full of retirees (and, to a lesser extent, poor people).

If you want a properly indexed graph, check out this [economist.com], which is the net flow of federal dollars as a percentage of each state's GDP over the past 20 years. Notice that the three mega-reds are West Virginia (poor whites), Mississippi (poor blacks), and New Mexico (poor Indians), and that there's a lot of red down the Eastern Seaboard, where the Northeast retirees go, and in the Mountain West, where the California retirees go.

Are you suggesting that means-testing Social Security and Medicare is on the table for the Democratic Party? Because I'd totally be on board with that. Hell, if the Democrats are going to become fiscally responsible, I'll become one. I'm tired of the Jesus freaks in the R column anyway.

The small state bonus doesn't exist. Part of the Electoral College design was intended to give small states a boost, so they're not completely dominated by their larger brethren, but the founders didn't have the mathematics necessary to really understand the effect of their design. We do now, and the conclusion you reach by evaluating the situation according to the various vote power measures is that in fact the reverse is true. The power of bloc voting means that power disproportionately accrues to large blocs, which means large states in this context.

If all states were to allocate their electoral votes proportionally, then small states really would get a boost. As it is, they're actually disadvantaged by the system. Not as disadvantaged as they'd be without their extra vote or two, but still disadvantaged.

Candidates for President rarely if ever campaign in larger states because we have less pull than the smaller states do.

Nonsense. They focus their campaigning on the states whose vote isn't a foregone conclusion. Obama didn't need to campaign in California or New York, and there was no point in him campaigning in Texas. Both Obama and Romney spent lots of time in Florida, however; a swing state with 25 electoral votes is important to them.

The GP's notion sounds like a standard "parliamentary" system. How is that going to lead to Balkanization? For that matter, considering how polarized we are in the USA right now, would it really be any worse?

Actually, a similar system seems to work ok for the Catholic Church, which could be considered as a non-geographically oriented political entity, complete with it's own laws, court system, a voluntary constituency which also funds it's operations voluntarily through their own contributions. Not shabby, especially when you consider it's lasted for 2000 years, which is longer than any government has.

They've got us over a barrel, though, when the only semi-affordable quality education in the region is via parochial schools.

If you find out later that your children are preyed upon will that still seem like a good enough reason to commit them to the care of priests?

I went to a catholic boarding school. While only a minority were actually molested and I wasn't personally one of them it was a toxic environment in which I spent my formative years. I think you also underestimate your own ability to influence your children's education and development. Maybe your kids will be ok. If they aren't they will pay a heavy price as will you.

Is that a bad thing? With our current system, large blocks of representatives behold to their parties obstruct everything. Anything that weakens the power of political parties, and enables representatives to vote their conscience, should be good thing.

Your geographical location matters quite a bit to your local economy. As an extreme example, Telluride and Ouray, Colorado, are only about ten miles apart, but try getting from one to the other in the middle of winter and see how long it takes...

Do you live in the slums? Does it take 20-60 mins for the cops to arrive if you call them? Are your streets covered in potholes? Are the local restaurants and food stores infested with rats and roaches? If it really doesn't matter to you, and the economy was so bad there was very little tax base to pay for these things, this would be your life.

Where do you shop for food? Where do you eat, if and when you eat out? Who provides the telecommunications services you need? How far away is the nearest plumber, electrician, or hospital? In a large city, you have a huge variety of choices on most of these. In a rural area, such simple things as choice of cell phone provider usually boil down to a monopoly because only one carrier has service at your house. You most assuredly depend on your local economy.

"Congresspeople shouldn't represent geographical regions, but specific groups of people, where ever they are. So every two years we hold an election, the top 435 get elected, and their constituents are the specific people that voted for them."

That's an interesting idea. But the problem is that you need to rewrite the constitution to a fundamental level to achieve that. You are pretty much talking about abolishing the notion of "state" and the "federal" governement does everything. Good luck convincing people to make a new constitution.

Disclaimer: I live in the USA but I am a foreigner. So my understanding of the organization of the state and federal government is limited.

You are pretty much talking about abolishing the notion of "state" and the "federal" government does everything.

Not necessarily. You could still have states that are geographical areas, it is just that the state borders would no longer be electoral borders for electing congressional representatives.

Good luck convincing people to make a new constitution.

I think everyone recognizes that we are engaging in fantasy here. Amending the constitution requires approval from 75% of the state legislatures. Since most states are small and rural and benefit from the current system, there is no way that this is going to happen.

We do not have a single election for president. We have 50 SEPARATE elections for president. Each state decides who best represents it's population and all electors (with few exepctions) go to that cadidate and the number of electors is based on population.

We need to remember we do not have a "democracy" by design. It's a consitutional republic based on federalism. And if you want to understand the reasons for that feel free to read the federalist papers (particularly Federalist 10).

Um -- they don't represent regions. The do represent "specific groups of people". They are called their "electorate". I'm sorry, but my representative wasn't selected by the San Gabrial mountains, but by the majority of the people in his disctrict. Those very specific groupe of people.

You don't need to limit it to 435 at that point. Barrier clauses and the limit on the number of representatives are chiefly for cutting administrative costs. In your model, the election and regular government would have to be carried out electronically anyway (due to complexity of vote counting), which scales well.

You could end up with a system where all legislative action is essentially by referendum, but where constituents could assign their vote to delegates at will.

DC should never have been given EC votes; it should have (mostly) been given back to Maryland. The people mostly don't live in the key Federal building areas, and so the idiotic idea of DC statehood wouldn't matter - they'd be citizens of Maryland.

Popular vote is the only method to accurately capture the desire of the entire population. It does NOT mean only the coasts will be visited since every vote counts those 10 democrats in Nebraska and the 5 republicans in Vermont now count for a national win.

Except we have exactly one national election - the Presidency - while we have hundreds of state-centered ones (Senators, Representatives, Governors and other state offices, State Representatives, etc.).

While we certainly could create a parallel election system just for the Presidency, there are a number of reasons not to do it. The more important ones are federalism and triage - Slashdotters in general are unconvinced by the desirability or purpose of federal government (a unitary central state is so much more efficient - it's so clean from an engineering perspective!) and underestimate the worth of triage (we have had elections requiring recounts - a national recount would be a nightmare). The less important ones are cost and complexity - ever since the 2000 election we've been pouring money into electronic voting, better voter access, computerized counting systems, etc., etc. and the national voting system still sucks. Why does anyone think this would ever be done correctly?

We live in a country where being asked to show identification in order to vote is considered beyond the pale, as is the simple expedient of dipping a finger in ink when you have done so. (I am aware that this is not how much vote fraud occurs - fraud generally being wholesale rather than retail - but it has a significant effect on the perceived legitimacy of the vote.)

"No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay."

Probably not. Fortunately, they don't need 100% of the states to agree to make the change. The compact goes into effect as soon as states representing 270 electoral votes have agreed to it; at that point it doesn't really matter whether the remaining states ever agree to it or not, since the signers of the compact will always determine the result.

Yah, it's sooooo much easier to get the States to bypass the amendment process....

Alternately, 75% of the States have to agree for a Constitutional Amendment.

Yah, it's sooooo much easier to get the States to bypass the amendment process....

Read the article (here's the link again [wikipedia.org]). Only 270 electoral votes' worth of states need to agree for this change. This is because a state is constitutionally allowed to allocate its electors in any way that it wants. Under the national popular vote compact, each state agrees to allocate their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of what the state's own citizens do. Once enough states agree to this, it doesn't matter if the other 268 votes' worth of states decide to go along or no

Popular vote is the only method to accurately capture the desire of the entire population.

Nope. No method exists [wikipedia.org] that accurately captures the desire of the entire population. Plurality voting is especially biased by the choices, whether done with electoral colleges, popularity, or any other system of tallying.

Actually, the best system is one that maximises the power of an individual vote. To do that, you need to increase the chances that your own vote is the tie-beaking vote, to do that you split the voter base into units and sub-units, because you are more likely to be the tie-breaking vote in the tie-breaking district in the tie-breaking state, than you are the single tie-breaking vote in a single national poll.

Second, you need to ensure the counting system doesn't introduce its own biases that effectively pre

The opposite of "tyranny of the majority" is not "tyranny of the minority". The problem you complain about does not result from a failure of democratic process, it is due to the monopoly enjoyed jointly by the two-party system. The electoral college does not contribute to that, it is victimized by it.

The key insight of the US federal structure as originally embodied in the Constitution was that every constituency deserves a hearing - the people are represented in the House, the states are represented in the Senate, and the President is elected by whatever means the States appoint - they can be more or less democratic in the selection of electors. A necessary consequence of the first-past-the-post system with specific electoral districts used in the US is that it is designed to produce a two-party state. Third parties have to influence one of them. Yes, third parties matter less here. On the other hand, it relentlessly forces both parties' platforms to the center of the electorate, strongly curbing radical influence.

It was not designed to produce a two-party state. There's a great deal of evidence (for example, Federalist Paper #10) that many of the designers of the Constitution were, in fact, trying to create a non-partisan system. Unfortunately, with few real-world examples to take lessons from, they did not see how the system they were designing would inevitably lead to a two-party state.

It's no accident that most democracies to be founded after the United States have chosen not to directly copy its system of government.

That one favors the GOP so it's evil. No really, the wonkish left [thenation.com] has been in a panic [latimes.com] recently over a proposal to do just that in a few of the swing states (Pennsylvania [prwatch.org] and Ohio, I think).

The National Popular Vote [wikipedia.org] is assumed to favor the Democrats so it's all sweetness and light. Unless you're a Republican, where it's an obvious abrogation of the Founder's federalism.

That one favors the GOP so it's evil. No really, the wonkish left has been in a panic recently over a proposal to do just that in a few of the swing states (Pennsylvania and Ohio, I think).

Actually the reason it favors the GOP is that the proposal is just to do it in states that went Democratic that happen to have Republican governors. The Republicans certainly weren't proposing splitting up the electoral vote in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. Just the states they lost.

Then you tie in the rampant gerrymandering that passes for redistricting these days, there would only be a few places worth campaigning.

Republicans managed to win more congressional seats while losing the popular vote (for the congressional elections). So it's not a fantasy that such a system gives them an advantage.

The gerrymandering is not bogus. While a state may lean one way or another, the distribution of the votes is not uniform, therefore Republicans and Dems will tend to win in states that the other party generally has an overall majority in. Gerrymandering is real, and is easier for Republicans because Dems votes are concentrated in urban areas and tend to be overwhelming. There was a fairly large precinct in the last election without a single Republican vote. Congressional districts tend to be the same size, so if, as a party, your supporters are concentrated in a single urban area, you get really large margins there. If you are trying to win an election, all other things equal (especially overall number and distribution of voters), you want to win by slim margins, and have your victories spread out.

Secondly, the only states where this was proposed were states that vote Democrat and have Republican controlled state senates and governors. Basically, the system rather blatantly takes away Democrat electoral college votes in the states the Dems are winning, while leaving them unchanged in the states that the Republicans are winning. Ignoring the 2 electoral college votes given to each state for the senators it has, if all states that vote Dem did this, they would lose up to 40% or so of their electoral college vote, and could never win a presidential election. For this alone, the idea is deeply repugnant. The fact that a "serious" politician actually discusses this should be unsettling to all voters. When politicians lose elections, they should either change to suit their electorate or quit, not change the rules to get into power regardless of the electorates wishes.

Can you guys stop referring to the Dems as "the Left"? For those of outside the US, your left is more right than our right. This means in a global context the Dems should be called "the Right" and the GOP "the Far Right".

Of course, everyone's going to look at their own area - to see how it got right or wrong regarding where they live.

In my case, I'm in Western MA, and I have to say that they got this little part of it exactly right - merging us in this area into "Willimantic" which connects us with CT with Hartford as the capitol instead of being in the "ass end" of Massachusetts.

I've long been bothered by how little we in this part of MA have to do with those east of 128 / or even east of 495.

I've always loved these thought experiments, carving up the world into new and improved political alignments. This stemmed from encountering C. Etzel Pearcy's proposed 38 State map [tjc.com] published in the 1975 People's Almanac; his notions of a better functioning nation arising from a more equitable distribution of state alignments really had an impact on me, growing up as I did on the mostly barren east side of Oregon, and listening to my elders constantly complaining about getting shafted via taxes by the moneygrubbers in Portland/Salem/Eugene. The Almanac also featured another new map of the US, with 22 states I think; can't find any info about it at the moment though.

Also an interesting read was Joel Garreau's book The Nine Nations of North America, [wikipedia.org] which was more about the cultural mass regions that make up the continent.

This assumes people from different parts of the country are interchangable and are going to be happy no matter how you group them. The problem is that isn't the case; you think things are politically polarized now, a plan like this would be even worse.

You think the people in Highway are going to be happy being governed by politicians in Oregon that doesn't really care what's going on in a set of islands hundreds of miles away because they massively outnumber them don't need their votes anyways? You think the people in Montana and Idaho are gonna be happy being controlled by the busybody Mormons in Utah? And Shiprock is probably going to have an actual shooting war when Lubbock and Abilene figure out that Austin is going to dominate them electorally.

Oh, indeed. Ogalla isn't much better off than Salt Lake. Northern Canaveral is going to be equally unhappy being dominated by the southern portion. Shasta on the other hand will be dominated by *it's* northern half. Half or more of the map seems to be deliberately created to encourage regional political warfare.

And I wish you could zoom in further... So Cal looks to be pretty hinky, and New England is unreadable at this scale.

This speaks to doing away with winner-take-all rules that many states have. I can pretty much guarantee that people living in central California have little in common with people living in downtown San Francisco, ideologically speaking. So why should the latter get to speak for the former? Yet in California, all electoral votes have been magically switched leading people to think the whole of California is liberal. I've been saying this for the past 20 years that the political divide in this country is not about Republican vs. Democrat. It's much more about ruralite vs. urbanite. When you look at election results broken down by county instead of by state, you see a much different picture. Urban districts generally vote liberal Democrat while rural districts vote conservative Republican. Party ideology aside, people in rural areas have vastly different priorities than those who live in cities. People who live in cities often are so full of themselves that they think only they know what's good for city dwellers as well as those who live in the country and they tend to impose legislation without having the slightest bit of experience living in the country.

People who live in cities often are so full of themselves that they think only they know what's good for city dwellers as well as those who live in the country and they tend to impose legislation without having the slightest bit of experience living in the country.

But of course the reverse never happens. Nope. Those pure honest virtuous salt-of-the-earth country folk just naturally know by common sense what's best for everybody.

The winner-takes-all rule in most states is a core problem but not the only problem with the electoral college. A solution, though, that promotes a different version of us-versus-them tribalism like you suggest isn't a solution at all. Changing from red state/blue state to urban/rural is a step backwards. We need to break the stranglehold of the two-sides-of-the-same-coin, two party monopoly that ruins our representative government. Restoring the proper role of corporations and breaking the power of money would help greatly too. Then the electoral college might return to providing the function for which it was designed.

BTW, Texas has the same urban/rural divide as California but in different proportions, so if you think that making California more like Texas would help the country you are misguided. It's not even clear that would help if it was done in lock-step with making Texas more like California. We have a "choice" between two terrible options. We need better options, not different rules for making the same crappy choices.

"People who live in cities often are so full of themselves that they think only they know what's good for city dwellers as well as those who live in the country and they tend to impose legislation without having the slightest bit of experience living in the country."

The system favors rural voters; due to the peculiarities of both the electoral college and congressional districting, people in rural Arkansas get a larger voice in national politics than someone in the South Bronx.

Slavery and the balance between slave and free states. The author of the article has no sense of US history, which is sad and scary. Logically it makes no sense to lump Hawaii with a west coast area due to isolation and different climate. Lumping Alaska with Rainer makes no sense either for the same reason. There is more to geography than human population. Remember, the "Geo" in geography means "Earth". The physical features of the planet, politics, and limitations of technology often trump an idealization of reality. So over all I give the article a big "meh". It's too simplistic to be interesting.

I agree with some posters that this lacks a sense of history and an appreciation of geography.

It also deeply lacks a sense of culture. There are combined areas with no common culture and indeed cultural opposition across geography. This re-Balkanization, so to speak, might as well offer the opportunity to dismantle the United States -- which is, in all ways except language, as culturally distinct as most of Europe.

It's true that the Electoral College somewhat overrepresents small rural states. This is because each state's electoral votes is equal to the size of its Congressional delegation, and all states have 2 Senators regardless of size. (Also, the smallest states still have 1 Representative, no matter how minuscule their population.)

But that problem really doesn't come up too often. It did in 2000, to be sure, but in every other instance in the past century, the Electoral College results had the same winner as the popular vote results. A much more serious issue is that the Electoral College gives rise to the phenomenon of "swing states."

Defenders of the Electoral College often claim that if it was abolished, then Presidential candidates would only bother campaigning in the big states and ignore everyone else. But under the current situation, we have an even worse situation: the campaigns are largely restricted to a handful of states that happen to be almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. That means that if you live in New York or California or Texas, you'll be essentially ignored through the whole Presidential campaign. On the other hand, if you live in Ohio, there is no end to the amount of pandering the parties will do to get your vote. The current situation results in a vast majority of the American people being written off as irrelevant to a Presidential campaign! This is one way we wind up with crappy policy like ethanol subsidies: they play really well in Midwestern swing states, so no one with Presidential aspirations will dare to challenge them.

Many countries, not just the U.S.A., have provisions that legislation must be passed by both a majority of population and a majority of geography. Hence
congress allocated by population, but each state has two senators, whether it's Wyoming or California.

Canada doesn't. Our Senate [wikipedia.org] is appointed by population (by regions on paper,
but by population in practice), so Ontario has the most MPs and the most senators. Here in B.C. we
have similar issues: the vast majority of the population live in the southwestern corner of the province, but the happening industry is
in the northeast, which feels more kinship with neighbouring Alberta. Including using the same time zone.

We've also looked at proportional representation [wikipedia.org] in B.C., but that didn't get off the ground. I would have
welcomed it.

I haven't run the numbers, but the electoral college favors less populous states by guaranteeing a minimum of 3 electoral votes. California has 66 times the population of Wyoming but only 18 times the number of electoral votes. My initial guess would be that the voters in rural Western states (Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Idaho, etc) would lose clout in this scheme, and those are all Republican strongholds.

The top 10 states are California (D), Texas (R), New York (D), Florida (swing), Illinois (D), Pennsylvania (swing), Ohio (swing), Georgia (R), Michigan (D?), and North Carolina (swing?). So 4 D, 2 R, and 4 swing states (depending on how you define them): so maybe the Dems suffer a bit from the electoral college at this end of the spectrum.

The hard question is what happens when you split these states up: Atlanta freed from the rest of Georgia goes blue, but the middle of Pennsylvania goes red without Philly and Pittsburgh, etc. So maybe the article is right that when you run the numbers it disadvantages Democrats, but I'd be interested to see the analysis because I don't understand how you come to the conclusion that this favors Republicans without it.

(I know this isn't a serious proposal so apologies for geeking out over it.:)

The problem with the premise (and I recognize it's not serious) is that it utterly ignores the entire basis of the foundation of the United States.

It's understandable when people from other countries don't "get it". It's sad/pathetic (and I'm really talking about the comments here) when people ostensibly FROM this country don't understand the basic premises of their own history.

"The electoral system overrepresents the least-populated states". Yes, that is PRECISELY the point.

The United States is not a country like most others, in which case the subdivisions are relatively-arbitrary political/administrative districts, counties, oblasts, whatever.The separate states are (or were) SOVEREIGN states, with a constitutionally-enforced protection of that sovereignty. The US Federal government is only allowed to act in very narrowly-defined areas that were mutually agreed by the original colonies to be of jurisdictional benefit - defense, foreign policy, etc.*

It's worth saying again: the States are NOT 'districts' of the US in the familiar sense that most countries have. For example, the US Federal government passes few laws that directly impact citizens. By far, the majority of laws applicable to people directly in the US are state laws and local (city) ordinances. The US Fed doesn't set national speed limits, for example; they set a limit and tell the states to comply or they won't get their Federal highway maintenance dollars.

The union of the Colonies was specifically predicated on a level of balance that allows them a voice disproportional to population.

One might further point out that Congress ITSELF has worked to make it less representative. Note that in the first Congress, the House was approximately 62 members for a colonial population in 1790 of 3.8 million. Proportionally, this would mean the House today would be over 5000 members. Remember, that this likewise would impact the number of electoral votes in play, and pretty much eliminate the 'senator' anti-populist bias.

*Granted, the Constitution is pretty nearly in tatters, the remaining shreds filthy with the wipings of modern administrations and congresses who have actively colluded to evade and sap both the letter and spirit of the original framers.

Have you any idea how many US cities and counties, let alone states, have Native American names already? Alaska (through Russian), Arizona (through Spanish), Hawaii, Idaho (disputed), Illinois (through French), Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan (through French), Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming are all derived from Native American words in some form or another. That's almost 40% of the states.

The purpose of the electoral college was to avoid having the most important office in the federal gov't be victim to popular fervor. In a direct election, radicals can be too easily elected (see tea party). This system prevents that in theory (along with the voting system of the electors: in seperate areas. This prevented one guy from giving a moving speech and changing the minds of everyone.)

The purpose of the electoral college was to avoid having the most important office in the federal gov't be victim to popular fervor. In a direct election, radicals can be too easily elected (see tea party). This system prevents that in theory (along with the voting system of the electors: in seperate areas. This prevented one guy from giving a moving speech and changing the minds of everyone.)

The Electoral College was the result of a political compromise at the 1787 Constitutional Convention because the participants couldn't make up their minds how the President should be selected. Just about every possible method was suggested by one participant or another, and the Electoral College was just the one that happened to pass.

We can respect the work of the Founding Fathers without treating them as infallible gods. In fact, refusing to think for ourselves and instead treating their work as a kind of Holy Scripture is completely against the Enlightenment values that they stood for.

Even in the mid 19th century Walter Bagehot in his great defence of the Westminster system; The English Constitution, saw the US electoral college as a failed institution that had never really fulfilled its intended function.

Then why is the USA the only country using indirect elections? Every other modern country that used it at some point has switched to direct elections.

Then why is it that you can't even do a basic wikipedia search for indirect elections to realize that you don't know what you're talking about?

Germany, Italy, Estonia, Latvia and Hungary all use indirect elections...

There are currently 33 countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and India that all use the Westminster system, which is considered to be an indirect election because you vote for a party and if it's that party gets the majority, or the leader of one party has the support of more t

That's incorrect. The president of Germany [wikipedia.org] is elected by the Federal Convention, which is made up of all members of the German Federal Diet (Deutscher Bundestag, elected by proportional representation every four years) plus the same number of representatives elected by the states' parliaments. Therefore, half of the result is determined by indirect vote, and the other half by double indirect votes (populace votes for representatives in the state parliament, those vote for representatives in the Federal Convention, and that in turn votes for the president).
There is however, no popular vote at all for the president, the elections for the president don't coincide with any federal or state elections. Few people really care, because the president usually has a much lower profile than the chancellor..

The whole indirect voting systems like the US Electoral College were created to deal with the logistical problems of giving every citizen the vote.

Uh, no.

We have the electoral college because we live in a federated representational republic, not a democracy. The individual citizens of the United States don't get a vote for president. Our states do. We only get a vote to tell our state government who we would prefer they vote for. And, they don't even need to listen to us (and have in the past chosen to vote against the will of the people)!

In this day and age, the only purpose of indirect elections is to give undue weight to rural areas.

In this day and age, we forget that Massachusetts and New York and Virginia, etc, saw themselves basically as sovereign nations, only joining together in that pesky federal government business to give them a united front in dealing with the old European powers. We forget, in this era of "excuse anything with the Commerce Clause", that the vast majority of the constitution took great pains to refer to the states as such, rather than as mere political subdivisions of the whole.

You also forget that before that whole "one man, one vote", having a voice in government depended solely on how much land you owned. Urbanites didn't give farmers more of a voice out of charity, but rather, the large landowners graciously allowed the unlanded to have a voice at all.

Has the time come when we should realign our political system with modern perceptions? Or should we respect that we have such an archaic system for damned good historical reasons?

Personally, I think the recent gun ownership debate has brought exactly this issue to the center of attention - We have urban yuppies who've created their own violent crimes hell, trying to take guns away from rural areas with almost no violent crime. Perhaps the Founding Fathers understood something about us that we have forgotten.

I think it's possible to accept that 1) there are damned good historical reasons and 2) that those historical reasons no longer apply and the system should change. Your post has brings some interesting historical facts, but history only explain problems; it doesn't justify them.

The GP is wrong though. Of all the offices that we have, it's just the President where we don't directly vote. Ever since the early 20th century when the constitution was changed to require the direct election of Senators we've been more democracy than republic.

I take it you don't understand what a democratic republic is. Those people you're referring to aren't politicians, they're appointed to carry out the policies that we voted for when we voted for the President and the congress. Apart from the secretaries, most of them work through multiple administrations and carry out the priorities of the President of the time.

We have the electoral college because we live in a federated representational republic, not a democracy

You seem to think that this is a good thing.

I certainly do.

It bothers the crap out of me to see uninformed people voting for their representatives. To see them voting on actual decisions? No quicker way of destroying the country that I can think of.

Before I'm accused of defining "uninformed" as "believes differently than I do," I'll just point out that I follow my own guidelines, and unless I've taken the time to research the issues and all of the candidates running for a particular office meticulously, I don't cast a vote. Which generally means that I rarely vote, and when I do I leave most of the ballot empty, voting only for those offices for which I've taken the time to study every candidate and the relevant issues. I refuse to potentially cancel out the vote of a more informed citizen.

The antebellum South called, it wants you back. Seriously, this issue was settled at Appomatox Court House in 1865.

Seriously, has it? Tell that to the ten times since 1872 (I won't count 1872 since Greely died between voting day and the meeting of the electoral college) we have seen "faithless" electors. Great effort goes into choosing people extremely unlikely to vote against the will of the people of their state, but it still happens.

Of course they do. See Wyoming- a single person's vote in Wyoming is worth 3/563000 =5.32e-6 of an electoral vote (based on 2012 census data). A vote in California is worth 55/37200000= 1.47e-6 votes. A person in Wyoming is worth 4 times as much. That's completely unfair.

Now historically it makes sense- it dates back to right post revolution where we were really 13 nations who decided to band together into 1, and it was a compromise to get the small states to go along with it. It stopped making sense when we became a real nation beyond point of breakup- basically after the civil war it was outdated. Now, due to geography its a system that's totally unfair.

Jefferson and Madison and a few of the others were smart men with uncommonly noble intentions, however it is naive to forget that they were dealing with the reality of politics of their day, and that the politics they had to deal with were often as bad or worse than the politics we have to deal with today.

Might I remind you that the Three-Fifths Compromise was also part of the "completely fair and working as designed" system put in place in the Constitution. Slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person when counting up population for the House of Representatives. It was working as designed, right up until two-percent of the entire US population had to be killed in the Civil War to get it repealed.

Both the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Electoral College are the result of SLAVERY-POLITICS. They were not some noble and perfect system for better government, they were designed and selected for the purpose of balancing the political power of Slave-States vs Free-States.

The Constitution had to be ratified by the petty politicians of the various states, politicians who first and foremost were concerned with their own political power and their own political agendas. The Three-Fifths Compromise and the Electoral College are nothing more than arbitrary bullshit political compromises catering to Slave-politics, designed to give pro-slavery and anti-slavery political forces equal political power, so that neither side would reject and kill off the Constitution.

As for Federalist 10, it has no relevance to the existing Electoral College. Federalist 10 would only be relevant if you were to propose electing unpledged electors. (The positive or negative value of electing unpledged electors to the Electoral College may be an interesting theoretical exorcise, however I'm sure you'll agree that modern Elector-elections would immediately devolve into partisan politics.)

However that still fails to address the central criticism being leveled at the existing Electoral College. There is absolutely nothing in Federalist 10 to justify wildly disproportionate representation of voters. A Wyoming voter gets more than four times the representation as a California voter, and a Vermont voter gets more than three times the representation as a Texas voter. That does nothing to combat factors or any "tyranny of the majority". That merely gives arbitrary factions disproportionate power and replaces any possible "tyranny of the majority" with a "tyranny of an arbitrarily overrepresented minority".

It's to prevent one group of "interests" or "factions" as Madison put it, from squashing the liberties of others.

With pledged Electors, the Electoral College has zero connection to Federalist 10 and does exactly zero to counter "interests" or "factions" from squashing the liberties of others. And with the grossly disproportionate representation in the Electoral College it greatly magnifies that problem. Our Electoral College now empowers arbitrary minority "interests" or "factions" to squash the liberties of the majority. Our Electoral College completely subverts the point of Federalist 10.

And a person in a swing state is worth exponentially more so than either Californians or Wyomingites. So what?

Uhhhh.... yeah..... there's two main parts to the argument why the Electoral College is crap. Are you attempting to refute the "unequal representation" flaw in the Electoral College by citing that the Electoral College is ALSO flawed for lumping votes into state-wide blocks?

Citing the second flaw in the system in no way refutes the first flaw. And arguing that there's two problems rather than one is hardly an argument in defense of the Electoral College.

Our system is designed to protect minority interests against mob mentality. I'd say that's a virtue.

Rural areas don't have undue weight - how many rural states does it take to equal one OH, NY, FL, TX or CA? Electorally those states are monsters that decide who will be President - the rural areas do not have undue weight.

Those states have far more electoral votes because they have far higher populations. Votes in less-populated states have slightly greater weight than votes in states with higher populations. A state with a population of two million that has two representatives (numbers rounded to make the math easier) gets four electoral votes, or one per 500,000 people. A state with a population of 20 million and 20 representatives gets 22 electoral votes, or one per 900,000 people.

Do you even know why there is a Senate? The Senate's obstruction is deliberate. The Senate is the chamber where bad bills which would become bad laws are supposed to die. It may seem like it "prevent things from getting done" but that's why it's there, because it is far better than the knee-jerk nonsense of two-year term political hacks who would enact virtually any law just so something "can be seen to be done" before their next election season.

There is a reason that our Republic has 'undemocratic' elements. Pure democracy fails, fails quickly, and terrifyingly transitions through ochlocracy to some form of autocracy. This has been understood and demonstrated since antiquity (see Polybius et al), and it is why our founders were wise enough to establish a more complex, resilient, synthetic system of government.

To the founders, the "Senate problem" was a solution, not a problem. Proportional representation was not the ultimate goal; it was a goal that needed to be tempered. The Senate does that.

"The Founders" weren't one unified body. The bicameral system was a compromise [wikipedia.org] between large-state representatives who wanted proportional representation by population, and small-state representatives who wanted all states to have an equal vote.

The people we usually think of as "Founding Fathers" – most notably James Madison and Alexander Hamilton – wanted proportional representation and weren't too thrilled about the Senate, though they were willing to accept it to avoid scuttling the whole enterprise. According to Wikipedia, "Madison argued that a conspiracy of large states against the small states was unrealistic as the large states were so different from each other. Hamilton argued that the states were artificial entities made up of individuals, and accused small state representatives of wanting power, not liberty." The people who were gung-ho for an equal representation Senate were much more marginal figures, such as Gunning Bedford, Jr. [wikipedia.org]

I forgot to add my example for illustration. Imagine being in New Hampshire now where the gun laws are fairly liberal and getting licensed to own firearms is generally a non-issue, to now being a member of my state, Massachusetts, where the local sheriff can deny your license for just any old reason, up to including he doesn't like your haircut. I'm sure there wouldn't be riots, protests, demonstrations, and just a general displeasure over that one issue in one area alone. Now multiple that buy thousands of

OK, I'll bit. %0 states and shades of gray. You know where I going with this, right?

Seriously, this is the main problem, I think. There are only two parties and they are almost identical. The discussions can be compared to talking if Pepsi or Coke is better, but leaving out all the other drinks.

This isn't a republic democracy. It is a farce that holds up an image as if you have anything to say.

In the past there were people who were not happy with the way their government was running things, so they threw th

Which is to say: the American Constitution is structured in such a way that the only way to increase your party's strength is to drive relentlessly to the center of the electorate. It is not without its problems, but it also curbs radical notions - the US has had Progressives and Know-Nothings, but very few Communists or Brownshirts.

So you're saying that he should either love it or leave it? That's kind of a false dichotomy. Maybe he thinks that California is the best state there is, but despite this it still has some massive problems. That's pretty much how I feel about California.

Do you always get offended when people try to improve their governments?

Yeah lol, if we redraw the statelines after each presidential election like the article suggests, then the gerrymandering will get out of control. We'll have the ugliest states you've ever seen in your life.

It will be a win-win for everybody: socialists, which tend to mooch off more densely populated areas, will get to play socialism, and the rest of us will be free from their control.

Absolutely false. Urban centers tend to support people in rural areas, and this is certainly true in New York where the city pays out more in taxes than it gets back in services. This also occurs at the national level. So you, libman, are a direct beneficiary of my tax dollars. Now I don't mind supporting your welfare ben

No, a better idea is to follow the 38 States [tjc.com] proposal made in the 70s (but with a little updating since there's been some big demographic changes since then). The NYC metro area should indeed be a separate state, but this holds for every metro area. Basically, no metro area should ever cross a state line, whether it's NYC, Chicago/Milwaukee, Portland, or Louisville. After this, the state boundaries should be drawn to keep local cultures together and minimize political infighting.

That's because you're trying to boil everything down to only 2 "sides", as if there's only two kinds of people in this country, "liberals" and "conservatives", which is total bullshit. These two "sides" are really just shaky alliances based on a bunch of different issues that frequently don't have that much to do with each other. For instance, Democrat voters in the Northeast are nothing like Democrat voters in San Francisco. The SF voters probably care about issues like gay marriage, gay rights, maybe e